RCsocial.net is (mostly) a functionally unmodified, up-to-date instance of Mastodon. For the technically curious, here is an overview of the deployment technology used here:
Software Environment
- A current Linux distribution (in a very basic configuration)
- A pure Docker environment for all functionality: Nginx, Mastodon, Postgres, Redis, backup, cert management, cron, container management, performance monitoring, test environment, etc.
- Text, appearance, and some advanced configuration modifications are applied to the official Mastodon source code to meet the needs of RCsocial.net
- Wasabi for media and archival storage
- Cloudflare for content delivery and origin isolation
- Mailgun for transactional email
- Fast Presence for this User Guide
Hardware Environment
- dedicated KVM based VPS
- 32GB reserved ECC RAM
- RAID-10 NVMe storage
- 8 Xeon E5/Gold vCPUs
- resilient networking
- high availability data center
Considering your own instance?
Mastodon documentation encourages folks to launch their own instances and generously makes all code available. However, the process to launch an instance is more involved than simply following a few steps or making a few clicks to get it going. You will not succeed (if at all, not long-term) unless you have prerequisite technical skills in Linux system administration. Customization beyond the basics will also require serious developer skills.
As an alternative, you may wish to consider managed Mastodon hosting offered by mastohost or Spacebear.